Appeal to ISO 639 RA in support of Elfdalian

[Mats Blakstad]

2016-04-23 20:50 GMT+02:00 Shawn Steele <Shawn.Steele at microsoft.com>:

> Ø  Are you planning to use that tag youself? Or why do you care that
> someone else gets a tag they need? It is optional for any application to
> support BCP47 language subtags. And I'm not interested to wait into a
> potential eternity for the code. People can of course always create their
> own private subtags, but that will of course become a complete showstopper
> for anyone that want to develop localization data, and prevent Elfdalian
> from digital development.
>
>
>
> That sort of proves my point.  If the users in need of Elfdalian are aware
> of a private tag used by some provider of appropriate data, then the
> community can use that tag.  It can even be localized, at least on some
> systems.
>

But I can't add a private subtag to any other platforms!

>
>
> Either way, if there is a private use, or “official” hacked tag, then when
> the correct language tag becomes available systems have to migrate.  My
> experience has been that changing tags is often somewhat painful,
> particularly when different parts of the system have to agree on the
> change.
>

I guess that paint will mostly concern people working on Elfdalian
localization data.


> At that point, since it doesn’t matter if it’s some private use tag shared
> amongst the community, I’d prefer to wait for a real ISO 639 tag.
>

It does matter that it is not a private subtag shared in a community.
And to provide a languag subtag is not really such a big problem as
different platforms can choose to support it or not.
And I think we should put very little weight into what you prefer, as
you're not even planning to use the code yourself!

>
>
> Additionally, if we create a tag and then ask ISO for a tag, that might
> give them a reason to say “see, you don’t really need it.”
>

The ISO tag will still be more useful as long as other applications don't
support the BCP47 language subtag.
And I don't think that that the RA will look into this matter with such a
childish perspective and say anything like  “see, you don’t really need it.”
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.alvestrand.no/pipermail/ietf-languages/attachments/20160423/cc6d8bb5/attachment.html>